Betty's Excellent Adventure part 2

Yesterday we started the Rensselaer adventure of Betty, the cosmopolitan gal from Indianapolis. Despite her fine breeding and elegant manners, she really is a biker girl at heart.

She is also quite a swinger. In fact, any adult with her will get tired of watching her swing long before she gets tired of swinging.

When I thought it was time to leave, Betty did not. So there was a little test of wills. She thought that if she waited on the bench, I would turn around and come back. I have had enough contests of will with two-year olds to know how this game is played, and to know how to win it.

Betty was away from her parents for the first time in her life, and whenever you have a child under those circumstances, it is always a bit uncertain how things will go. She decided she wanted to climb up onto the big platform at Brookside Park with this ladder. I would have preferred that she use a different approach, but she did fine. I wonder what her mother would have thought about this. Her grandmother was pretty agitated.

Some of the slides were too big for her--she could not control her body on the way down. It is too bad Brookside does not have a smaller slide just for toddlers over by the Emma house.

The playground equipment at St. Augustine's is much better for little kids. The slides there only have a vertical drop of about four feet. They also have nice gravel beneath them that little kids enjoy kneading.

The other big outdoor adventures for Betty were two trips to the LaRue pool. Last year when Desert Boy was in town, the kiddie pool was closed so we visited Lake Banet. As a result, I have not had a good excuse to post a picture of the dolphin.

A score of years ago when I spent a considerable amount of time in the kiddie pool, there was also a seal that spit water. Its foundation is still there. And I think when we first came, there was a slide where the dolphin is now.

One the first day, Betty was a bit reluctant to get into the water and spent much of the time pouring.

But she eventually got into the water and got comfortable with it. Then she saw people jumping off the diving board in the big pool and walked (or maybe ran--little kids do not like to walk when they are excited) to it, got on it, and probably would have gone out to the end of it if she had not been stopped. I suppose it would have been fun to see what she would have done, but the thought of a two-year old jumping off the diving board was far too frightening to allow her to proceed.

At the end of the day, she got mummified or swaddled.

On the second day at the pool, she was far braver. She crouched down so the water was up to her neck and walked around saying that she was swimming. She had to be watched because she is so small that if she falls, she has a hard time getting back up. And she did stumble twice, getting a face full of water, but it did not deter her.

Betty had a great Rensselaer Adventure and is ready to come back for more. Maybe she will stay with us again next summer.